You Do Not Exist Anymore

 a poem by Roger B. Rueda

There are silences that make
their own weather—humid,
thick with the scent
of memory undone.

You were once
the warmest of them:
birthday cards cut like small novenas,
stars glued where prayer might
have been enough.

You were aunt, almost mother,
hairdresser of my sleep.
And now you’ve shed
our name like skin—
you live in Texas,
a place I cannot write to.

I imagine you—white shoes,
a child on your hip
whose name I do not know,
a man beside you
who never had to hear
your past spoken in our
river-sharp tongues.

You keep no page,
no trace,
no digital ghost to haunt.
You’ve mastered the art
of vanishing—
no breadcrumb trail,
no clue to come after.

And so I’ve learned, too:
the grace of forgetting
the ones who forget.

I will not seek you
in photographs.
I will not ask about
your life stitched
in someone else’s surname.

We will grow old
as strangers—
two women who once shared
a name, a room,
the hush of combs
on young hair.

This is my elegy:
no weeping,
no closure.

Only this vow—
that when the body fails,
and silence comes to bury
us both,
I will not reach
across that dark
to find you.

Come Home to Tiwi

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

You, the accident of genius,
the wrong birth in the right family
of merchants of pride—
come home.
Come home to the place where no one
waits at the gate,
where no voice ever called
your name without a wince.

They never wanted you,
the boy who read too fast,
who answered before they could finish
asking. Your brilliance
was a burn mark on their paper-doll
reputations,
your medals like knives
hanging on the wall.

You have no aunts.
No uncles.
Only bloodline strangers
who count cash like rosary beads
and speak of God only when
calculating interest.
One flew to Texas—
and dropped the language,
the surname, the shame.
Another teaches in the next barangay—
but her silences are made
of your name,
bitten down like a secret
she never earned.

One cousin married young
to a man who didn’t finish college—
now her face folds in anger
whenever you are mentioned,
the son who left and did not break.
The son who wrote books
while they memorized
car brands and bank codes.
The son who passed exams
and was punished
by being forgotten.

Come home to Tiwi.
Not to arms.
There are none.
But to the tree whose bark
you carved initials into,
to the broken step
you fixed with your own hands,
to the house that sagged under
the weight of inherited silence.

They never missed you.
They loved your absence.
It gave them room to boast
without your shadow
swallowing the room.

But the soil missed you.
The rain still waits to touch
your hair like your mother
never did.
The mountains remember
your footsteps
like a diary they never lent
to anyone else.

Come home,
not to be held—
but to reclaim what they sold
for gold that turned
to rust in their pockets.
Come home
not to be forgiven,
but to forgive the sky
for not shielding you,
and the land
for loving you in silence.

You, boy made of light
in a family of shadows—
come home to Tiwi,
because only the wind
knows your real name.

Come Home to Barotac Nuevo

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

You, son of the sea,
who now walks the tiled spine of towers in Dubai,
whose hands once smelled of lake brine and tilapia skin—
come home. The water still remembers you.
Your father’s boat, its wood warped by years of dusk,
still floats in the estuary like a prayer
half-said. Your name is still
a fishhook caught in his throat.

You, daughter of the soil,
who now watches sunflowers fold their arms
against the snow in Bavaria—come home.
Your mother’s palms, thick with mud and faith,
still break open the ground every morning.
She plants kamote with the same hands
that once unbraided your hair by candlelight,
when the rain played drums on the tin roof
and you mistook thunder for war.

Barotac Nuevo is not the place you left.
It is the place that stayed,
like a scar on the inside of the thigh—
a place no one sees,
but aches when you bend too far
into the lives you borrowed.

The streets are older now.
The sari-sari store’s rusted signage
still flickers under the weight of rain.
The church bells ring at dawn
like the breath of your grandmother
escaping her chest
one Ave Maria at a time.

Your cousins are all grown.
One drives a tricycle.
One sells lumpia at the plaza.
They still speak of you
like a saint exiled by progress.

Come home.
Not to live, perhaps.
Not to stay.
But to remember how silence here
tastes like ampalaya and river mist,
how mourning is folded
into every prayer before meals,
how even the chickens
look up when a plane passes—
wondering if it’s you.

Come home,
even if just to sit by the water
and let your body confess:
that despite the glitter,
despite the snow,
despite the foreign languages
you’ve trained your tongue to carry—
this,
this was always your first name.

Moonstone in the Mouth

fiction by Roger B. Rueda

The sea is flat today. It doesn’t glisten or gesture, just lies there like something uncommitted. I sit at the same bench I’ve sat on for years, watching its tired mimicry of movement. A boy passes by on a bicycle with no shoes. A fisherman in the distance lifts a net, looks into it, shrugs. Life continues, dull and exacting.

I adjust the necklace. The stone is cold against my collarbone, heavier than it should be for its size. They say moonstone is for intuition, clarity, protection. But I’ve worn it for years and feel no wiser, no less vulnerable. It’s not clarity it gives me, but the burden of remembering what others can’t.

Sometimes the scent of guava blossom drifts through the salt air, and I think I’ll see him again. Julio. My memory has reshaped him. Not softened. Reshaped. The way a river reshapes a stone, not by smoothing it but by defining what’s missing.

It was a Thursday—of course it was a Thursday—when I last saw him. He pressed the necklace into my hand and said, “You’ll understand later.” But I already understood, in the way people do when there’s no more time for anything but honesty. He was thin, his eyes yellow at the edges. The other one—Elias—stood behind him, silent like a tree waiting to fall.

I don’t tell the story often. Not because I’m afraid of being doubted, but because I’m afraid of being believed too easily. There’s something obscene in how quickly people want magic to make sense. They nod too fast. They smile as if what I’m offering is entertainment.

But there are things that happened. Things that can still be traced like bruises under the skin of this town. If I were to go to the old woman who sells mangoes near the market and ask her about the two men who once lived near the church, she’d frown, hesitate, and then say, “Ay, may ginhalinan ina eh. Pero daw wala gid ya man sang tawo dira subong.”

It begins with a fiesta. A woman. A touch that wasn’t a touch.

And so I start there, because stories always begin where forgetting tries to take root. And because Julio deserves to be remembered by someone who loved him—imperfectly, briefly, but without lies.

*****

It was the kind of fiesta that left no room for introspection. Everything was noise—too much of it—and color so aggressive it verged on the violent. The kind of event designed to make sure no one sat with their thoughts for too long. The church bells clanged as if announcing not faith but fatigue. Firecrackers cracked through the streets with the chaotic precision of war. Children darted past with flags, half-dressed saints, balloons tied to their wrists like afterthoughts. Pork fat sizzled in drums of reused oil. Cheap gin flowed like forgiveness.

Julio was there. Of course he was. The town never said his name without a small arch of the eyebrow, but no one told him not to come. He was known—just enough to be tolerated, not enough to be protected. He walked with that theatrical quiet some gay men develop in small towns: his movements careful, precise, always on the edge of disappearing.

He danced, not because the music called to him, but because the body demands its own forgetting. The kind of dancing you do to forget a birthday, or a face, or a phone left ringing for hours with no reply. Julio didn’t smile much, but his hips moved like he’d rehearsed.

That was when the woman appeared.

She wasn’t local. Or maybe she was—towns like this are always populated with people no one can place precisely. She wore a blouse that looked a generation out of fashion. Her face had no age, only shadows. She moved close. Too close. But no one stopped her.

Their hands brushed once. Then again. On the third pass, she leaned in and said something in Hiligaynon. Julio heard only the vowels: long, wet, and curving. It could have been a curse or a compliment. He didn’t ask.

That night, his mouth tasted of rust.

He thought it was the tuba. Or the heat. He spat once into the sink and frowned. The water ran pink.

By morning, the fever arrived. Not a loud fever. One of those slow ones that convinces you it isn’t real. The kind that makes you walk in circles thinking you’ve forgotten to do something important, but you don’t know what. He lost track of how many cups of water he drank. The fan stopped and started. Ants circled the sugar bowl with a confidence that unnerved him.

The doctor called it dengue. Said he’d seen three cases that week. Told Julio to rest, drink fluids, avoid pork for now.

Julio nodded. Said thank you. Paid in small bills.

But something else had entered him. Not just a virus. Something slow and observant. Something that moved differently inside the blood. He began to sense his dreams before he slept. The mirror stopped showing him fully, as if withholding opinion. His skin felt like it was listening.

He did not return to the fiesta the next night. The noise felt dangerous now, not festive. He kept the curtains drawn. The neighbors said nothing. They rarely did.

And so it began, not with a scream or a thunderclap, but with a touch during a song, and blood that refused to explain itself.

 

*****

Julio had never believed in healers. He had laughed at them, in his younger years, the way city people laugh at rural superstitions—politely, but with that slight upward curl at the lip that says, this world does not frighten me. That was before the blood, before the dreams, before the mirror began to hesitate in returning his image.

He didn’t know how he ended up in Elias’s hut. Someone had whispered a name to him at the market. Another pointed toward the hills. These were not recommendations, only faint suggestions offered without ownership. He followed them because the fever didn’t lift, and because the dog in the neighbor’s yard had begun to whimper when he passed.

The house was a rectangle of nipa and rot, surrounded by overgrowth that had learned to keep still. It did not pretend to be more than it was. A place where things lived and died without much discussion. The smell was sharp—coconut oil, leaves, something faintly metallic.

Elias answered the knock slowly. A man not old, but made older by solitude. He did not greet Julio, only looked at him for a long time, as though confirming something he had already known.

“You’re late,” Elias said—not as reprimand, but as fact.

They did not speak much. Julio stayed. He was offered ginger tea, warm and oversteeped. There were no beds, just mats on the floor. Nights passed without ceremony. No explanations were demanded, and that was a kind of mercy. The kind Julio had never learned to ask for.

The ritual was repetition. Tea. Leaves crushed with a rock. Hands on forehead. Silence. Days were marked not by events but by whether the wind passed through the doorway or not.

Julio’s body began to change. It started subtly: shadows clung too long, food lost its texture, and his skin itched when he passed churches. He would wake in the early hours convinced he had bitten down on something raw. Once, he looked at his fingernails and found dirt beneath them though he had not left the hut all day.

One night, a stray dog came too close. It bared its teeth but didn’t bark. Julio met its gaze and saw not fear, but recognition. The dog backed away, slow, reverent. Elias said nothing. Only poured more tea and added a leaf Julio couldn’t name.

He began seeing things. Not hallucinations. Just slight deviations. The reflection in the basin looked back at him too quickly. His shadow moved before he did. And when Elias touched his wrist one morning to check his pulse, Julio felt nothing. No panic. No blood. Just an awareness of absence.

“You’re changing,” Elias said, the way one might remark on the weather. “But you’re not the first.”

Julio did not ask what he meant. He had learned not to.

And in that small clearing, under banana trees and indifferent stars, they became a unit. Not lovers, not quite. Something else. Bound by hunger, by silence, by the slow realization that neither of them would be going back to the life they’d once spoken about in half-lies.

Craving arrived like a low tide—predictable, and inescapable.

It no longer mattered what the doctors had called it. Elias knew. Julio knew.

What was happening had nothing to do with disease.

It had to do with a shift in the blood. A leaving of the body from the rules of men.

And the healer, who spoke to plants, did not resist it. He steeped the tea. He watched. He waited.

*****

Julio never spoke of it as a curse. He understood the need people had to name things as evil when they were simply unmanageable. But this—it was not punishment. It was just… what came next.

He did not resist it. He brushed his teeth even when blood tasted sweet. He wrapped his limbs in fabric when his skin became too pale for day. And when the need came, once a year and never predictable, he would retreat far into the cane fields, trembling—not from hunger but from shame’s ghost, which still lingered at the door.

Elias watched, measured, waited. He was not a man who asked for reassurances. He had seen enough to know that most love, if it is real, is made of quiet submission to change. One evening, he sliced the pad of his finger with a bolo, pressed it to Julio’s cracked lip, and said nothing. Julio didn’t resist. It was a gesture, not of desperation, but of consent.

The transition took weeks, though they never marked a single day.

When it was done, they shared a rhythm not unlike sleepwalkers. They were careful. They were efficient. They did not moralize. Elias walked with a steadier foot than Julio. Julio laughed more than Elias. That was their balance.

They kept to themselves, slipping in and out of landscapes like ghosts who knew better than to ask for recognition. They became invisible—not through magic, but through the practiced art of not being needed by anyone.

The silence of the rural life suited them. No one asked questions they didn’t want to answer. The dogs stopped barking at their scent. The trees seemed less suspicious. The world, when you stopped touching it, often left you alone.

Every Holy Week, they climbed Mt. Napulak.

At first, it had been a search for reversal. A romantic idea—that some spiritual geography might undo what biology, or fate, had done. But over time, the climb became its own kind of rite. Not for healing, but for anchoring. For remembering they had chosen something together, even if that thing was unclean by any known religion.

At the summit, where the wind curved like something wild but rehearsed, they would rest. Sometimes they spoke. Sometimes they didn’t.

It was there, on their third pilgrimage, that they saw him.

Simón.

A boy—or rather, something shaped like a boy. He had eyes like stagnant river water—beautiful until you looked too long. His clothes were white, never wrinkled. His voice arrived before he did, like humidity. He didn’t greet them. He only looked and smiled. The kind of smile that assumed you’d already said yes.

“I’ve watched you,” he said, not bothering to lie about it.

Julio said nothing. Elias’s hand tightened slightly around the edge of the pack. They didn’t fear him, exactly, but they recognized his type. The lonely ones. The ones who call attention generosity.

Simón hovered. He never walked. He reclined on air like it was a hammock. He hummed. He whistled. He asked too many questions. He never waited for the answers.

“Three,” he said one evening, teeth glowing like pearls soaked in dew. “Three is a stable shape. Two always wobbles.”

He brought them wine that tasted of rain. Leaves braided into necklaces. A flute made of something that shimmered like fishbone. He never made threats. He made suggestions. Always smiling.

Julio looked away. Elias turned cold.

They began planning their descent earlier than usual.

Simón said, “You could be happier.”

He meant it. That was the terrible part.

They left before the light changed. The climb down was wordless, the air thick with the weight of a desire too long unacknowledged.

 

*****

Simón returned, of course. Desire always does—reconfigured, more polite, more persistent. He appeared on the path back to the base of the mountain, arms crossed loosely behind his back as if he'd simply materialized from boredom.

"You’re still leaving," he said. Not a question. More a statement of confusion. "People don’t usually walk away from an invitation like mine."

His beauty was harder to define in the daylight. It thinned. Became something ornamental. There was an edge to it now, like the gloss on a counterfeit coin. His shirt no longer glowed. His voice no longer carried. He was trying.

He followed them—not walking, just there, again and again, at the bend of a path, beside a tree, ahead on a ridge. Offering things: laughter, metaphors, something called immortality but with sweetness. He spoke of harmony. Of threes as stronger than twos. Of how loneliness, when shared, becomes light.

Elias kept walking. Julio, once, allowed himself a glance. Not out of weakness, but curiosity. There was a part of him, once sharpened by rejection, that remembered the appeal of being wanted.

But that was another version of himself. One that had needed to be seen to feel real. Julio now lived in a different kind of body. One that knew presence did not require permission.

“We’ve chosen already,” he said. The first thing he’d spoken aloud to Simón. “That should be enough.”

Simón blinked. The wind stopped.

It was not rage that followed. That would have been too clean.

What came instead was absence.

Not loss. Absence.

A prayer forgotten mid-recital. The taste of Elias’s tea, once sharp with ginger, now bland. Julio forgot a date once, then a name, then the rhythm of a song he used to hum while washing his feet. Small vanishings. A piece of cloth missing. A dream receding before it could begin. Not erasure. Just the dulling of color in the mind.

Elias began speaking slower. Words took longer to find.

The dog near their hut—an old mutt that had once barked at nothing in particular—stopped reacting to them at all. As if they had become scenery.

Julio felt it first: the sense that they were being slowly unscripted from the world.

Simón never returned in body. He no longer needed to. He had withdrawn himself from them. And in doing so, he had started pulling the world away with him.

They didn’t speak about it much. The language around such things never feels useful. But both understood, eventually, that the forgetting would grow.

And so they fled.

Not from danger, but from evaporation.

They packed little. A bag. A jar of vinegar. The moonstone, already dulled from too many sunless days. They took the early boat out of Iloilo. No goodbyes. No note. The woman at the port barely looked up from her newspaper.

It was raining lightly. Julio held Elias’s hand the entire crossing. Neither spoke.

There is a kind of silence that doesn't feel safe, but necessary.

They stepped onto the Guimaras dock like men arriving not at safety, but at delay. At the one place left where forgetting hadn't reached yet.

*****

Guimaras offered no promises. That was its appeal.

They arrived on a Wednesday, just before noon. The heat was unremarkable. The boat rocked gently, not as welcome but as routine. On the dock, the vendors barely glanced at them—two quiet men with thin bags and no past.

They rented a room above a woman who sold banana cue and vinegar sachets. She never asked questions. She assumed they were brothers. Or cousins. People preferred their stories neat when possible. Julio let her keep the illusion.

They opened a small fruit stall on a quiet road—mangoes, occasionally guavas. They priced modestly. Never haggled. People liked them because they never insisted on being liked. That alone was rare enough to warrant return customers.

They attended church, not for prayer, but for the rhythm. They stood in the back, under the oscillating fan that always wheezed once before it turned. They nodded at the priest. They did not kneel. And they never took communion. The host would have stuck in their mouths like a lie.

At first, things seemed stable. The forgetting felt paused. But time has its own kind of erosion.

The world grew quieter.

Not with peace, but with subtraction.

Birds no longer startled at sudden movement. Dogs stared too long, then turned away, disinterested. Elias’s reflection in the mirror began to delay. Julio once watched his own shadow disappear while his body still stood still.

Elias started coughing. A dry, weak sound. Not illness, but refusal. The body dimming itself, like a candle lowered in stages. He tried herbs, but the leaves crumbled too easily. Nothing took root anymore.

Julio noticed that strangers didn’t remember their faces. A man who bought mangoes every Thursday asked if they were new in town. Children pointed and said nothing. The stall’s sign faded, though they had painted it only weeks before.

They began to understand: Simón had not cursed them to die. He had done something worse.

He had ensured they would vanish while living.

That is when they contacted me.

Not through drama. A letter, hand-delivered. Brief, almost forgettable. It said only, “Maundy Thursday. After Mass. Come alone.”

The house was simple. A folding chair, a bamboo mat, a bowl of water that didn’t ripple.

Julio looked older. Not aged. Worn down. Elias sat, already halfway absent, eyes unfocused as if trying to remember something that no longer had a word.

They told me the story—not for sympathy, but for record. Julio spoke in a hush, not because someone might hear, but because he feared the words themselves might slip away before they landed. Elias never interrupted. Occasionally, he nodded. Once, he smiled.

When it was done, Julio took something from a tin box. The moonstone. Oval, smooth, milky, warm.

“It’s the only thing he gave us that didn’t want us back,” he said.

He pressed it into my hand. Not with ceremony. Just finality.

“It keeps them away. You’ll feel it.”

I didn’t understand, not fully. But I accepted. Some things you receive simply because someone needs to give them away.

Their last words?

“Thank you for coming.”

Then, quieter: “Don’t stay long.”

And then, almost as an afterthought, from Elias, his voice rough with the edges of forgetting:
“Don’t try to remember everything. It’s not yours to carry.”

I left that night.

By morning, the fruit stall was closed. The door bolted. The neighbors said they had moved, but none remembered when.

The moonstone still hums faintly when I wear it. Sometimes, in mirrors, I don’t quite see myself.

But I remember them. Even now.

And perhaps that is what the stone protects most.

*****

I live alone now. That isn’t unusual. Many do. What’s different is the quiet I carry—something deeper than solitude, more precise than loneliness. It’s not grief. I don’t think I was permitted grief.

No one remembers their names anymore. Not the priest who used to nod at them during Mass. Not the fruit vendor who once shared ginger tea with Elias. Not even the landlady who lived beneath them, who now insists the upstairs room has always been empty.

The world is efficient at forgetting what doesn't flatter it.

But I remember.

The moonstone still sits on my collarbone, its weight subtle but constant. At night, when the air thickens and the sea forgets to move, I feel it pulse. Not rhythmically. Just once. A faint throb—enough to remind me that I remain outside of something. Outside of reach.

I’ve stopped trying to explain. The people who need explanations want tidy endings, and this story never offered one. It resists closure. It wants only to be carried.

Sometimes, when the wind shifts from the east, I wake in the middle of the night with the scent of roasting pork and tuba in my nostrils. I hear music—not loud, not jubilant, but distant, continuous. A fiesta that never packed up. The kind that loops behind the veil of sleep like a radio playing from another room.

I do not follow it. I only listen.

In those moments, just before the morning birds begin their scratchy rehearsals, I see them.

Julio and Elias.

They are barefoot. Always barefoot. The ground does not wound them anymore.

They are dancing—not in celebration, not even in joy, but in affirmation. That they chose. That they endured. That they remained visible to each other when the rest of the world closed its eyes.

The moon is too full. It leaks onto their shoulders, their hair, their open palms. Their bodies glow—not like ghosts, but like riverlight: slow, trembling, impossibly alive.

And the place?

It’s not Guimaras. It’s not Mt. Napulak. It’s nowhere on any map. A place they carved for themselves in defiance.

I do not join them. That, too, was never the point.

I wake, sit with my coffee, and face the sea.

It has not remembered them either.

But I have.

And perhaps that is enough.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Balasan Is a Kind of Blue

fiction by Roger B. Rueda

The van smelled like sour tamarind candy and engine grease. I was pressed between a window and a woman clutching a basket covered in old newspaper, beneath which a rooster occasionally clucked like it remembered some insult from a previous life. The child across from me sang in bursts—something in Hiligaynon, lilting and off-key, with the occasional interruption of a plastic toy being dropped and retrieved like clockwork.

I stared out the window, not because the view was remarkable—at first it wasn’t—but because I didn’t know what else to do with my face. Iloilo City had already begun to fall away behind us, its buildings shrinking like things remembered too late. I watched the transition like someone witnessing a version of their own past dissolve: the sidewalks frayed, the cement thinned, and the tricycles grew rustier, louder. Soon, everything was sugarcane and sky.

It was strange to feel this kind of stillness inside a vehicle. As if the silence of the province was leaking through the windshield and into my bones.

Balasan arrived without drama. One minute we were rolling past fields that shimmered with sun-patched boredom, and the next we were there—among tired signage, open-front sari-sari stores, and motorcycles parked like sleeping dogs under trees.

The driver shouted something I didn’t catch, and suddenly the van emptied. I stepped out, my shoes crunching gravel. The air hit me in the face with no apology: thick with the wet scent of fish entrails and the ghost of something frying—maybe bread, maybe hope—and something metallic, like rust. Or blood.

I didn’t flinch.

I walked toward the poblacion, dragging my suitcase over uneven stones, passing a store named “Blessed Mami House,” and a poster of a local mayor smiling like he’d personally discovered happiness.

The room I had rented online was behind a bakery that sold stale ensaymada at five pesos apiece. The key was waiting in a plastic box taped to the door, along with a note that read simply: “Stay safe, God bless.”

The door creaked like it had secrets. Inside, it was nothing—bare window, single lightbulb, thin curtains that barely clung to their rod. A small bed. A fan that looked old enough to remember Martial Law. A smell, soft and unplaceable, like mildew mixed with candle wax.

But somehow, it felt holy.

I sat on the edge of the mattress and stared at the blank wall, letting the silence settle around me like a shawl.

This was the first silence that didn’t ask me to explain myself.

And I didn’t realize until then just how tired I was of talking.

****

In Balasan, time felt like a story being told underwater.

Each morning folded into itself with quiet precision. I’d wake before the sun had fully broken open the sky, wash my face with water that felt like it came from a river’s memory, and step out into the already-thickening warmth. Outside the bakery, a woman in a hairnet sold pandesal from a plastic tub lined with white cloth, the kind that smelled faintly of wood smoke and flour. Her kape was instant but generous, served in reused ice cream cups, too sweet to be taken seriously, but somehow exactly what I needed.

I walked to the santol tree near the plaza—a knuckled giant with leaves like sagging hands—and opened my journal. The pages were already starting to curl from the humidity. I didn’t write much, not yet. Mostly fragments. Sentences that didn’t know how to end.

“The sun here doesn’t burn—it lingers.”
“Even the dogs seem to remember something I’ve forgotten.”
“Loneliness is different when no one is watching.”

Around me, the town moved like a daydream. Children ran barefoot on concrete hot enough to bake, chasing each other with sticks and laughter. Vendors arranged green mangoes in pyramids, their voices slicing through the air in rapid Hiligaynon. A karaoke machine somewhere sang “Sometimes When We Touch,” off-key but unashamed. The town was a collage of noises that didn’t demand attention—they simply existed, like birdsong or breath.

On Thursdays, I went to the market.

It was there, between the dried fish section and the stacks of empty Styrofoam trays, that I saw him.

He was tying a bundle of plastic rope for an old man, measuring it against the length of his own arm. His shirt clung to his back, damp from heat and effort. His laugh was low, lazy—like it had nowhere else to be. And then he looked up.

Our eyes met.

It wasn’t dramatic. There were no violins, no slow zoom, no cinematic pause. Just a flicker. Like when your skin registers a change in air temperature before your mind catches up.
Recognition?
Projection?
I didn’t know.

But he looked at me as if he’d just remembered something he wasn’t sure was real.

And I held that gaze a second too long.

He nodded, politely, then returned to his task. That should’ve been it. A moment folded neatly and forgotten.

But something had already shifted in me—quietly, without permission. The way water shifts before a wave.

*****

After that first look, I started seeing him everywhere.

Not in a mystical sense—no omens, no signs. Just ordinary places made suddenly sharp by his presence. At the plaza, where old men played chess under the shade of trees that looked older than language. At the sari-sari store, buying instant noodles and a sachet of shampoo. Near the barangay hall, crouched in the heat, helping an old woman fix a wheelbarrow.

He always moved like the sun didn’t quite touch him. Not hiding, just... resisting absorption. His voice, when it came, was softer than I’d expected—like he didn’t trust it entirely.

It was at the tindahan, over lukewarm C2 and a pack of SkyFlakes, that we first spoke beyond pleasantries.

“You’re the one who sits by the santol tree,” he said, not as an accusation but as a fact gently laid down.

“I write,” I offered, then immediately regretted it. It sounded too much like a confession. Too easy to misunderstand.

“Poems?” he asked.

I nodded. He looked genuinely curious. Not mocking. Not trying to impress. Just... interested, the way some people are with constellations they’ll never name but still love to look at.

The next day, I left a book for him at the tindahan: The Captain’s Verses, Neruda. I had underlined the softest stanzas, the ones that left bruises shaped like questions.

A week passed.

Then, one afternoon, he appeared beside the santol tree, a little hesitant, holding the book like it might hum.

“I didn’t know poems could feel like that,” he said. “Like... you’re being told a secret you already knew.”

We talked.

Not all at once. Our conversations were puzzle-shaped: a corner here, a piece of sky there.

He told me about his father, who was a fisherman. About the night the waves swallowed their boat like it was made of tissue. About the days after, when silence was heavier than grief, because there was nothing to bury.

He told me about his plan to buy a motorcycle. Not for vanity. Just to feel, for once, like he could leave whenever he wanted. As if movement was proof of control.

And then, one twilight as the lamplights flickered on, he told me about the seminarista.

“He used to call me bro like he meant it,” Joever said. “But he’d look at me like I was... something else.”

He didn’t say more. He didn’t have to.

We sat there, in that stillness between confession and denial, the air thick with things we didn’t name. The world around us kept spinning, casually cruel. The sari-sari radio played “Just Once” by James Ingram. A dog barked, was ignored. Someone shouted “Halin dira!” at a tricycle.

But none of it mattered.

Because Joever looked at me like he wasn’t sure if I was real.

And I felt the terrible, beautiful ache of wanting to be.

*****

Joever invited me with a shrug, like he wasn’t sure I would say yes. “It’s just my cousin’s birthday,” he said. “Lots of food. Probably too much gin. Come if you want.”

I wanted.

The party was in a small house near the edge of the barangay, where the road stopped pretending to be paved. A tarp sagged in the yard, tied with string to two bamboo poles. There was lechon on a makeshift table, its golden skin glistening under cheap colored bulbs. Kids darted between adults, their laughter wild and unsupervised. Someone passed me a glass already half-full of gin and calamansi. I took it without asking who it belonged to.

Joever moved easily in the crowd, all nods and tapped shoulders, like he belonged to everyone. But now and then, his eyes would find me—across the grill, near the cooler, behind a line of women belting karaoke—and something in his gaze would soften, fold inward. As if I was the secret he was trying to keep even from himself.

Later, when the sky had fully darkened and most of the older guests had either fallen asleep or passed out, he pulled me gently toward the beach.

There was no moon, only a smear of stars. The sea was dark and vast and unspeaking.

We sat on a bleached piece of driftwood, our bare feet disappearing into the foam. My pants were already damp at the hem, but I didn’t care. The wind smelled of salt, and birthday cake, and the kind of closeness that couldn’t be planned.

Joever leaned forward, elbows on his knees. His voice came low, almost fragile.

“Do you think the sea ever wants to leave?”

I blinked. It wasn’t a question you answered. Not really. It was a thought wrapped in metaphor, and I could feel it pulling at something inside me—something I hadn’t dared name since I got here.

Our shoulders touched.

It was such a small thing, really. But it felt like being chosen. Just for a moment. As if we existed outside of everything—expectations, assumptions, danger. Just skin and skin. No armor.

I turned toward him, not quite breathing. His face was tilted slightly, his mouth parted—not in invitation, not exactly. Just openness. Like he didn’t know what he was about to do either.

The space between us was shrinking.

And then—
Laughter. Shouts from behind us. Someone called his name.

Joever turned his head, smiled, and stood up.

The spell—if that’s what it was—broke with a whisper, not a shatter. Nothing dramatic. Just the quiet sound of something slipping away before it could be held.

He offered me his hand. I didn’t take it.

We walked back in silence.

When I got to my room, I sat on the bed, damp and slightly shivering. I stared at my notebook but couldn’t write. Not yet.

Because I didn’t know how to describe a moment that didn’t happen.

Didn’t—but almost did.

And in that almost, I felt more exposed than if he had actually kissed me.

 

*****

At first, I told myself he was just busy.

That maybe his signal was bad. That maybe he lost his phone. That maybe—maybe—he just needed space.

But even as I typed out those justifications in my journal, I knew they weren’t true.

Joever stopped replying. He stopped lingering. At the sari-sari store, he nodded like I was someone he'd once borrowed a pen from in high school—familiar, but no longer relevant. On the street, he turned his head too quickly. The lightness in his smile had been replaced with something tighter, like he was holding his breath around me.

It was not cruelty. It was worse.

It was the practiced politeness of someone who had decided that forgetting was safer than remembering.

And then the whispers began.

At the tindahan, I heard one woman say, not even trying to lower her voice, “Ang manunulat nga taga-Manila.” The way she said manunulat—like it was both compliment and curse—made my skin crawl.

Another replied, “Daw indi lalaki. Daw indi babayi.” Then laughter, small and brittle. Like breaking glass under sand.

I stopped going out as much. The santol tree felt too exposed. Even the market, once a place of anonymous noise and scent, now felt rigged with invisible tripwires—eyes that lingered too long, greetings laced with too much or too little warmth.

The town no longer felt like a retreat.

It felt like a fishbowl. And I was the thing inside it that didn’t belong.

I retreated into my room, into my notebook, into the only place where I still had control of the story. But even there, the words betrayed me. I rewrote the beach moment half a dozen times—once as a poem, once as a letter I never sent, once as a memory twisted into fiction.

But none of it landed right.
Because the truth was: it didn’t happen.
And you can’t revise what never truly began.

I scribbled until the page looked wounded. I underlined a line from Neruda and stared at it for hours:

“Tonight I can write the saddest lines.”

But even that felt stolen. Borrowed grief. Someone else’s heartbreak.

Mine was quieter.
Mine didn’t even have a name.

*****

I stopped trying to find Joever. Or maybe I just stopped trying to be found.

Instead, I found the sea.

Not the postcard version. Not the one tourists photograph with filters and captions about healing. No—this was the sea with chapped edges, with foam that carried scraps of memory, with wind that smelled like rust and old salt. The sea that didn’t ask questions, but still made you feel like you were being answered.

I walked there in the mornings, sometimes in slippers, sometimes barefoot, not caring about the sand that clung to my ankles like small insistences. I brought nothing but myself and my silence, and in return, the sea offered me stones.

I started collecting them—not obsessively, but attentively. Some were smooth, others jagged. But one in particular stood out: flat, grey, the size of my palm. Cool to the touch no matter how long I held it.

It didn’t shimmer. It didn’t crack open with metaphor.
It just… existed. With a kind of patience I couldn’t understand.

In my notebook, the rock appeared again and again. Sometimes drawn in the margin. Sometimes mentioned in passing. Sometimes personified so deeply, it startled me.

I wrote my final poem in a kind of trance—early morning, sea breeze slipping through the screen, the smell of instant coffee lingering untouched.

It ended with a single line:

“I named the rock after no one, and still it answered.”

I closed the notebook slowly, like tucking in a child I wouldn’t see again.

Then I took a length of faded twine from my bag and tied the covers shut. Not tightly. Just enough.

I didn’t know what I’d made—whether it was a manuscript or a burial. Whether it was a story or a soft confession to a silence too wide to echo back.

But it was done.

And that, for now, was enough.

*****

I didn’t leave.

Not because of some sudden revelation or reversal. Not because Joever came back with apologies or because the town stopped whispering. None of that happened. Things stayed as they were—just quieter.

I stayed because leaving started to feel like running. And I was tired of running from things that hadn’t even tried to chase me.

Instead, I learned to live within the pause.

I began attending early morning mass at the old church—not for God, exactly, but for the rhythm. For the way the wooden pews felt cool against the back of my knees. For the murmured prayers that rose like steam from mouths that weren’t asking for miracles—just continuity. A decent catch, a child’s cough gone by morning, one more day with rice in the pot.

The old women didn’t ask questions. They only nodded, smiled. Called me inday one morning, dong the next. Like they were trying out names to see which one fit. Like they understood that some people are just shaped differently—and that maybe that, too, was a kind of blessing.

I walked home slowly now. Past the plaza. Past the tindahan. I no longer flinched when I heard laughter behind me. No longer mistook kindness for danger. I didn’t expect Joever around corners anymore, and in that absence, I found a strange kind of safety.

That afternoon, I returned to the santol tree.

It still stood, unmoved. The bark was rough where I used to rest my spine. The shade was cooler than I remembered. I opened my new notebook—this one blue, the color of dried seawater—and wrote without fear of what the words might mean.

A line came, then another. Then I stopped.

Not because I was afraid. Not because I was empty.

But because for once, the silence was enough.

The wind shifted. A page fluttered, then stilled.

I closed my eyes, not to escape—but to feel more.

Somewhere, a rooster crowed. A child sang.

And beneath the santol tree, I breathed.

Still here.

Still unnamed.

Still whole.

*****

The sun had lowered by the time I packed up my things beneath the santol tree. No audience. No crescendo. Just light softening on cement and the sky turning a deeper shade of waiting.

I walked back to my room—bare, familiar, still mine. The same rusted fan. The same window always slightly stuck. But everything looked different now, not because anything had changed, but because I had. Or maybe because I hadn’t, and that was finally okay.

I sat by the open window, the rock from the beach resting near my hand. It didn’t glow. It didn’t speak. It just stayed. And for once, so did I.

“In Balasan, I found no lover. But I learned to stay when the world whispered stay. And this time, I listened.”